This project is in line with the Scandinavian approach to the welfare state and the active, public role for stimulating
and facilitating innovation (Bason, 2010). Researching this pilot effort to build an incubator for public innovation is
thus not only a study of how it could be done, but also an inquiry into the role of public support for an innovative public sector (cf. Mazzucato, 2014; Ansell and Torfing, 2014; Osborne and Brown, 2013). Current societal challenges are creating pressure for the public sector to increase effectiveness and deliver better services. Many agree that the relationship between people and the public sector in general and public services in particular should be radically reshaped (Manzini and Staszowski, 2013).
There has been a recent move away from new public
management based approaches to public innovation
(Bason, 2010). Generally this means a move towards a
more collaborative (Ansell and Torfing, 2014) and symbiotic process (Mazzucato, 2014). Hartley (2013) shows there are both great overlaps between public and private innovation, and distinct differences. Notably, incentive to learn from others is less clear in the public sector where new knowledge is not an obvious driver of competitive capacity.
In conclusion, research also points to the need to develop more local-specific models and approaches to innovation-support in public organisations. Beyond the triple-helix model of collaboration (Etzkowits and Leydesdorff, 2000) public innovation needs support from a local organisation that can provide the solution to the incentive problem,
and feed innovation processes with organisational support. Whereas incubators have provided this support for business start-ups, developing an incubator-model for public innovation is new and timely.